KEY POINTS:
The new Sports Anti-Doping Act, which comes into force next week, will give Drug Free Sport NZ (DFSNZ) much wider responsibilities to explore potential breaches of all eight anti-doping rule violations.
These include trafficking, assisting, evading and so on. This moves us beyond the sole reliance on positive tests to determine whether or not doping is occurring.
It will require the organisation to liaise closely with other bodies, notably police and customs, to ensure that information which may be relevant is made available. It will have the responsibility to investigate any and all evidence that doping may be occurring in New Zealand or by New Zealand athletes overseas. The key thing here is that it provides the potential to get at the people who are encouraging and assisting athletes to dope and not just see the athletes alone penalised.
It is important to note, however, that the Act gives DFSNZ little power, co-operation is voluntary and any penalty resulting from its activities can only be applied by a sporting organisation which an individual has made a choice to join and thereby accept its rules. There are other important changes.
The Act requires DFSNZ to write rules which must ensure the anti-doping programme in New Zealand faithfully implements all mandatory requirements of the code and they must be updated as the International Standards change. This process provides tremendous benefit to New Zealand sporting organisations which can simply adopt the DFSNZ rules meaning they do not have to worry about continually updating their own individual set of policies and possibly falling out of sync.
It is not mandatory that sports use this method but it is a condition of their funding from Sparc that they remain compliant with the code, and the rules are the simplest way for sports to do this.
The Act also establishes the Sports Tribunal (previously set up by Sparc as the Sports Disputes Tribunal) which, while retaining wider responsibilities, will hear doping cases.
In contrast to the old system where DFSNZ itself made a ruling, now it must present allegations to the tribunal which will make the decision as to whether or not a rule violation has occurred.
This, along with the ability to take blood samples when needed, (most testing is done via urine samples) are the only practical changes which athletes may experience.
New Zealand athletes have been outstanding supporters of clean sport and gold medallists such as Sarah Ulmer, Hamish Carter and Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell have been among the strongest advocates.
The implications for the anti-doping programme are significant.
Let's set the context.
Despite the media-highlighted examples of bad behaviour of athletes, spectators and others, sport provides massive benefits, on a daily basis, to individuals and communities. That is the premise underlying financial support for sport and anti-doping work.
Unfortunately, there are all too many examples of how those benefits can be jeopardised by the insidious intrusion of doping.
The former Eastern European regimes, professional cycling, and professional baseball in the USA are just a few examples of what can go wrong with elite sport if an ethical approach is not taken.
The greatest fear is that, in environments such as those, young athletes at the development level can feel compelled to do what they regard as necessary to progress and so succumb to doping.
In New Zealand there is (thankfully) no evidence of a systematic problem within our sporting environment. Certainly our testing programme does not reveal one. This is undoubtedly a product of a sporting culture which as a whole rejects the use of drugs to aid performance.
It is also likely that New Zealand's relatively early adoption, in 1989, of a comprehensive testing and education regime has also had its impact.
We must accept two things however; firstly that while doping may not be widespread it is occurring, and secondly that we take the current healthy environment for granted at our peril. We need go no further than recent French research indicating significant levels of doping among teenage athletes to confirm that.
The maxim of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" does not apply. The Sports Drug Agency Act was drafted in 1994 with some amendments in 2000 - it has served its purpose well but is no longer up to the task.
The world has moved on both in terms of the techniques athletes use to dope and the international response which has occurred.
The latter received its greatest impetus from the formation, in 1999, of the World Anti-Doping Agency (currently headed by New Zealander David Howman) and the adoption in 2003 of the World Anti-Doping Code (Code). Further advance was made by the ratification this year of the Unesco International Convention against Doping in Sport to which the New Zealand Government is a signatory thus binding it to support the implementation of the Code.
This Code provides for a comprehensive response to doping in sport and requires all 600-plus signatories (including the IOC, International Sports Federations, and National Anti-Doping Organisations such as DFSNZ) to implement it in full.
New Zealand's problem has been that the old legislation did not give DFSNZ the mandate to implement all the Code's elements, leaving ill-equipped national organisations with the burden of applying those important parts which DFSNZ could not.
This is the crucial issue because over recent years more and more evidence of doping in sport has emerged, not from old style testing, but from the gathering of other types of evidence resulting in the revelation of widespread and cynical doping.
The Balco case in the US is the best known example where documentary evidence and testimony from other athletes led to bans on high profile athletes such as Tim Montgomery and showed close association (at the least) of Barry Bonds, Marion Jones and others with this doping fraternity. There is a similar example in Spain but New Zealand has not been in a position to act adequately should evidence have emerged that such activity may have been occurring here.
Application of the Code is likely to place greater burdens on athletes to comply with procedures to prevent the spread of doping. DFSNZ will need to carry out its new functions with reasonableness and care to ensure this support is maintained into the future and that sport remains (from this point of view at least) a desirable environment for parents to encourage their children to be part of.
